[chubot]

Sure, Perl can be hard to maintain. (I haven't used it in over 25 years, and don't expect to ever use it again)

From your experience maintaining 40+ year old codebases, is it possible that improving the Perl codebase is the best choice in a certain situation?

Or should we always be "surprised" that Perl exists? (honest question)

In other words, I don't see the connection between "this code is hard to maintain" and "I am surprised that it exists" / "it should be rewritten".